Fleecing of America: My overpriced college calls Internet ‘phone system for computers’

9 Comments

by Nicholas Deleon on January 29, 2008

I wish I were kidding, but this half-page of notes (higher res version here) cost me around $500 yesterday. I’m taking a class called Rise of the Web taught by Jay Rosen, which is supposed to explore how the Internet is going to change the [journalism/media] world we live in. You know, things we deal with here at CrunchGear on a daily—nay, minutely—basis. So imagine me sitting there being told that the Internet is like a phone system for computers. Really?! Wow! (I only took notes because I realized how absurd the class was and thought it’d make a good post here.)

I can only hope next week we learn about Wikis and why blogs are the wave of the future. Or maybe we’ll find out what a Web 2.0 is!

Total waste of time and money. I’ve got Call of Duty to play, teach.

Comments

Trae Dorn - January 29th, 2008 at 5:00 pm GMT+5

Reminds me of a CS professor who told me that web browsers were going to stop accepting <b> and <i> tags.

It hurts your brain sometimes.

weatherman - January 29th, 2008 at 5:39 pm GMT+5

you’re totally getting an ‘F’ now…and next year you’ll be teaching the class

AustynSN - January 29th, 2008 at 5:39 pm GMT+5

One thing to consider with classes, though, is that many of the people taking the class have NO knowledge about the subject matter. Thus, the classes must be designed to teach them as well. it’s why I think most classes should offer a quiz-out option. (Anything necessary for a medical degree, not so much.) That being said, I remember taking a computer class in college and getting into an argument with an instructor over wether Win95 was an operating system or a graphical shell. He admitted his incorrectness the next day.

John Biggs - January 29th, 2008 at 6:09 pm GMT+5

I went to the same school as Nicholas and this is sort of endemic of the current state of “web journalism” teaching. They should be teaching the “future” but they’re really teaching web 101 with old world journo techniques bolted on. Nicholas and I have had discussions about this and I think it’s important that kids don’t learn that the Internet is a telephone system but that it’s an entirely new medium and requires a certain skill set. It’s like giving a photo journalism class and saying “We won’t touch that camera. You just sit here and write stories ABOUT the idea of taking pictures.”

John Eddy - January 29th, 2008 at 6:09 pm GMT+5

So, maybe I’m tired from listening to dry online training, but…

I looked at http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/. Is this guy really supposed to be a ‘writer’? I felt like I was reading through moleasses (to mix metaphors)… Is it just me?

OTOH, I do sorta get the whole ‘The Internet is like a phone system for computers’ thing. Kinda. It’s grossly simplified, yes, but, at one level, that is what the Internet is. That’s how I’d explain that part of the Internet to my mom, for instance. ‘It’s the bunch of wires and stuff that allows your computer to talk to my computer’.

I’m more curious about the ‘web of knowledge that links us all’….